Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 5076

In the midst of the heated debate about AI sentience, conscious machines and artificial general intelligence, Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, published a blueprint for creating “autonomous machine intelligence.”

LeCun has compiled his ideas in a paper that draws inspiration from progress in machine learning, robotics, neuroscience and cognitive science. He lays out a roadmap for creating AI that can model and understand the world, reason and plan to do tasks on different timescales.

While the paper is not a scholarly document, it provides a very interesting framework for thinking about the different pieces needed to replicate animal and human intelligence. It also shows how the mindset of LeCun, an award-winning pioneer of deep learning, has changed and why he thinks current approaches to AI will not get us to human-level AI.

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Now, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the monster proton smasher at the European particle laboratory, Cern – gears up to start its third period of data collection on Tuesday, experts are hoping to unpick further secrets of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Bortoletto, now head of particle physics at the University of Oxford and part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, said her main memory of the events a decade ago was the moment two weeks before the announcement when the researchers unblinded their analysis of the data and saw unambiguous signs of the boson.

“I still, thinking [about] that moment, get the butterflies in my stomach,” she said. “It was unbelievable. It’s really a unique moment in the life of the scientist.”

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With the first half of 2022 coming to a close, NASA teams are continuing work to resolve the Lucy spacecraft’s solar array issue following its October 2021 launch. Lucy is a first-of-a-kind mission to visit several asteroids in Jupiter’s L4 and L5 Lagrange points. Currently, Lucy is coasting before its first flyby of Earth in October 2022.

Lucy’s sister mission, Psyche, has experienced compatibility issues causing a delay to a No-Earlier-Than (NET) July 2023 launch. Psyche is another first-of-a-kind mission to orbit the main asteroid belt object, 16 Psyche. Both Lucy and Psyche operate under NASA’s Discovery program.

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A listeria outbreak blamed for the death of one person and the hospitalization of 22 people across 10 states has been linked to ice cream made in Florida, the federal authorities said on Saturday.

Big Olaf Creamery, a family-owned company in Sarasota, Fla., exclusively sells ice cream in Florida, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Of those hospitalized, 10 people lived out of state and had visited Florida in the previous month, the C.D.C. said.

The infections tied to Big Olaf ice cream products occurred over the last six months and affected people less than a year old to 92 years old, the C.D.C. said. Five became ill during pregnancy, with one experiencing a fetal loss.

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Spotting wildlife in these dark and dense forests teeming with insects and spiny palms is always challenging. This is because of the very nature of biodiversity in Amazonia, where there is a small number of abundant species and a greater number of rare species which are difficult to survey adequately.

Understanding what species are present and how they relate to their environment is of fundamental importance for ecology and conservation, providing us with essential information on the impacts of human-made disturbances such as climate change, logging, or wood-burning. In turn, this can also enable us to pick up on sustainable human activities such as selective logging – the practice of removing one or two trees and leaving the rest intact.

As part of BNP’s Bioclimate project, we are deploying a range of technological fixes like camera traps and passive acoustic monitors to overcome these hurdles and refine our understanding of Amazonian wildlife. These devices beat traditional surveys through their ability to continuously gather data without the need for human interference, allowing animals to go about their business undisturbed.

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The U.S. announced on Friday a new $820 million Ukraine military aid that includes the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS). The Pentagon contract denotes the start of a contracting process for a significant amount of equipment, including four more counter-artillery radars and up to 150,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition, through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.

NASAMS can be quite an unpleasant adversary for tactical aircraft (possibly with the exception of the Su-57), helicopters, drones, subsonic cruise missiles (Caliber, Kh-101, 9M728). Against high-speed targets (from Oniks to Kinzhal) the benefit of this system seems doubtful.

5/— Dmitry Stefanovich (@KomissarWhipla) July 1, 2022

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